Many vehicles nowadays carry advertisement or other decorations. In the past, the advertisement or design was applied by an artist hand painting the advertisement or design onto the vehicle, such as hand painting a company name, address and phone number on a car door.
Recently, with the advent of new materials, the advertisement or design is created on a sheet of material away from the vehicle and later applied to the vehicle, using an adhesive applied to the sheet of material or an adhesive backed sheet of material. In such, a print shop would create the design or advertisement with a computer system and transfer that design or advertisement to a sheet of material and all or part of that sheet of material is applied to the vehicle. For example, the same company name, address and phone number is printed on a sheet of adhesive-backed vinyl, scored around the letters and number, applied to a door of a car, then the vinyl around the letters and numbers is peeled off, leaving only the letters and numbers.
In the past few years, printing and transfer systems have progressed to enable creation of large sheets of material on which such information and designs are printed or transferred. The sheets often cover the entire side or top surface of a vehicle (e.g. car, truck, van, bus, boat, etc). These printing and transfer systems are now affordable by many small operations such as sign shops, detailing shops, printing shops, etc. Often, such operations are very limited with respect to space and personnel, often operating with a single vehicle bay and a sole proprietor. In order to apply a sheet the length of many vehicles, there was no way for the operator to hold the material in a correct orientation, and then apply the material without introducing bubbles beneath the material or skewing the material. As a way to cover a vehicle side, these small operations often resorted to cutting the sheet material into manageable sizes then reconstructing the sheet on the vehicle. Such an operation is very time consuming and, if not carefully applied, will result in mis-registration of the designs and/or tolerance build-up in which the designs will slope towards one end of the vehicle.
What is needed is a method and apparatus that will support a sheet of material while it is being applied to a vehicle.